AI-generated art is a new frontier rife with potential. For example, look no further than this AI-powered experiment that creates kaleidoscopic visual landscapes for composed music. A collaboration between quirky synth and hardware brand Teenage Engineering and design studios Modem and Bureau Cool, the project draws inspiration from the neurological condition synesthesia. This rare phenomenon leads the brain to perceive sensory input for several senses instead of one. For example, a listener with synesthesia may see music instead of only hearing it, observing color, movement and shape in response to musical patterns.

When I was about 6, my mind did something wondrous, although it felt perfectly natural at the time. When I encountered the name of any day of the week, I automatically associated it with a color or a pattern, always the same one, as if the word embodied the shade. Sunday was dark maroon, Wednesday a sunshiny golden yellow, and Friday a deep green. Without knowing it, I was living the unusual mental state called synesthesia, aptly described by psychology professor Emma Geller as a "condition in which ordinary activities trigger extraordinary experiences." More exactly, it is a neurological event where excitation of one of the five senses arouses a simultaneous reaction in another sense or senses (the Greek roots for "synesthesia," also spelled "synaesthesia," translate as "joined perception").

Synesthesia is the rare condition when our senses melt together -- some say they can hear colors, others that they can taste words. But what if we let the senses of an artificial intelligence overlap instead? Belgium-based machine learning researcher and educator Xander Steenbrugge has developed a neural network that can turn music into trippy visualizations. Steenbrugge's project, called "Neural Synesthesia," makes use of a generative adversarial network. That's a type of machine learning system that specializes in generating new data from a given training set.

Can a video game be more than just a game? Can it train you to focus? To disassociate yourself from traumatic memories and heal your mind? Can it transcend your personal experience and bridge a geopolitical divide? These aren't just ridiculous claims from a marketer's fever dream -- one video game has done all of this before, reaching hundreds of millions of players: Tetris.

The ancient mind/body problem continues to be one of deepest mysteries of science and of the human spirit. Despite major advances in many fields, there is still no plausible link between subjective experience (qualia) and its realization in the body. This paper outlines some of the elements of a rigorous science of mind (SoM) - key ideas include scientific realism of mind, agnostic mysterianism, careful attention to language, and a focus on concrete (touchstone) questions and results.

This year, the DJ, artist, and Qosmo CEO Nao Tokui flipped the concept on its head. His project, Imaginary Soundscapes, is a convolutional neural network that hears sounds when it looks at images. Based on a given image, the software will choose from 15,000 sound files to find the "soundscape" that fits. First, he applied the software to Google StreetView to create an audio tour of the world, with AI-generated sounds to accompany any scene from StreetView, from echoing voices in Barcelona's Sagrada Familia cathedral to chirping birds on rural backroads. Viewers could "immerse themselves into the artificial soundscape'imagined' by our deep learning models," Tokui explained on Medium.

My tongue is orange!" my 2-year-old daughter shrieked after licking a dollop of clear hand sanitizer. "Mommy, my ear feels orange," she moaned when an earache struck. It's orange," she whined from inside her snowsuit when a scratchy tag in her new white glove rubbed uncomfortably against her wrist. As her vocabulary blossomed, she started to associate colors with scents. "What smells pink?" (Dryer exhaust puffing out of a neighbor's basement vent.) Anyone who has spent time around toddlers knows they say some strange things.

I remember the first time I was introduced to the concept of synesthesia. I was in seventh grade, sitting in the dark, watching an educational video about the neuroscience of the phenomenon in lieu of our typical life science coursework. A British woman with lexical-gustatory synesthesia appeared on screen to describe the way every name she'd ever spoken had a different taste. Many of the particulars of the documentary have faded in the decade since I last saw it, but I still recall the woman saying "the name Catherine tastes like chocolate cake." For years, I have wished (perhaps unfairly) that I had synesthesia, a rare neurological condition where senses enterwine.

The sight of flying umbrellas, changing altitude with a fluttering rhythm, looks more like an animated Disney scene than graduate work by a student engineer. "I wanted to push the envelope of coordinating drones in the sky," says the project's creator Alan Kwan, a student in MIT's "ACT" (Art, Culture and Technology) program. He wanted his drones to act almost alive, "not like things to be controlled by an algorithm," he says, "but flying creatures that take on a synchronous life." A Hong Kong native, Kwan, 25, has explored scientific art before. He won an award for his Beating Clock project, a reanimated pig heart that keeps time.